Podcast Episode - Dance In The Rain

Listen to Podcast Episode:

On this episode, Suze gives us an update on the ramifications of The Supreme Court's decision regarding the eviction moratorium. Then, she reflects on how all the bad news surrounding us now can sow the seeds of doubt.

Listen all the way to the end for a special email, from a listener, about hardship and hope.

Podcast Transcript:

August 29th, 2021. Now, I know, I know all of you are waiting to see is KT going to be here or not today. Who won the argument between the two of us? But truly we never argue that way. But you're just going to have to wait through this entire podcast to find out what we have in store for you today. So, August 29th , 16 years ago, Katrina on this very day hit New Orleans. What are the chances that 16 years later, the exact day that we have a hurricane also hitting New Orleans and Louisiana. So, our prayers and our well wishes and our protective energy goes out to everybody who stands to be hurt by the hurricane and trust me, KT and I absolutely know what that feels like. And there is nothing really, nothing other than protecting yourself that you can do. So never, ever put your things before you, just protect yourself. Also, we have to send our condolences and our love to all the families who lost military members in Afghanistan. For all the members of the family, for the people of Afghanistan, in terms of what they're going through as well as what happened to them a few days ago. I don't even know what to say about it, everybody. But all you can do is send your wishes to them as well. So, today's podcast is all over the place. So, what else is new? Because even though I said that this was going to be our actually, KT said it was going to be on long term care insurance, things always happen between Thursday and Sunday, the days that the podcast drop. That sometimes I just have to address that are more important to the topic that I had in mind. And so, we will try to address that on Thursday. Let's see. Hopefully nothing else will happen. But I do want to talk about what happened on last Thursday because the moratorium on eviction, what had been passed. Remember I did this podcast saying I was so upset, so many of you are going to be evicted and then all of a sudden it was extended to October 3rd. So, many of you who were afraid that you were going to be evicted or people that you know, we're afraid we're going to be evicted. They thought they had time. Well, last Thursday the Supreme Court blocked it, stating that congress would have to pass new legislation for a federal eviction moratorium to be in place. So, landlords started to celebrate because they now have the ability to evict again in many of the states and renters that are behind in rent are once again seriously afraid that they very shortly are going to be homeless. So, once again Congress by not acting in a way that they should have acted, knowing that they needed to pass this legislation, allowed the moratorium to come to an end. Before the $46 billion dollars of rental assistance could be distributed. Why would they have done that? The rental assistance was there $46 billion, and I have to tell you only about $5.1 billion of the $46 billion has been distributed. If that $46 billion dollars could have been distributed, then many of the renters could stay where they are because that money would have gone to the landlords and the landlords would have been okay and they possibly wouldn't have to evict everybody, because landlords need their money as well. But no, that is not what Congress did. They did not act in time. So, now the eviction moratorium no longer exists. So, what that means is that about three million, three million, some people say five million, renters will probably have to leave their homes sooner than later. And they're going to have to leave their homes at the same time, that delta is absolutely rampant in the United States. Can you tell this is aggravating me? The reason that this is aggravating me is that it didn't have to happen. It didn't have to happen like this. If just people would pay attention who are running this country would pay attention to those who don't have money. The moms and pops, landlords who need money when they're renters just pay attention and make things run efficiently. But that's not what happened? All right. So, what is it that renters as, as well as landlords, need to do. And maybe you know a renter that's in this situation and not you. But I'm sure all of us know one or two people who may be in this situation, facing the fact that they may be homeless sooner than later. The good news is, if you can consider this good news is that because of this there's going to be a tremendous backlog in the courts. So, when you have to go to court to make sure the eviction is legitimate and you are evicted, it could take a long, long time for the courts to get to it. You know, I remember back in 2007, and I had a driver by the name of Alan and Alan bought a home in the bay area and he couldn't afford to live there anymore. He was in foreclosure. So, I said, Alan, what are you going to do? And he said, oh absolutely nothing Suze because nobody's going to foreclose on us, they can't get to us because the backlog is so long. And I go, but Alan really Allen was allowed to live in his home for a year and a half without paying for it until they started to evict him. That's how long it took for them to evict Alan obviously when I found that out, I also switched drivers just, it was just an ethical thing and Alan obviously had some money that he could have paid towards it but he didn't want to pay it because real estate prices were going down, down and down. So, he figured he was better off to just be foreclosed upon. So, I know I just got off track so let me get back on track to what I was talking about in terms of what is happening right now. Going back to the $46 billion of emergency rent relief that only 5.1 billion has been distributed through July. The courts know this and because the judges know this, it may cause them to act also more slowly because they don't want to evict you, they want the system to work. But if you find yourself in front of a judge you might just want to ask them, please don't evict you until you get your rental assistance because you never know how that will affect them. But to be able to say that, you have to have applied for rental assistance. And the way that you apply for rental assistance would simply be go to home.treasury.gov and there you'll find the information that you need to know to apply. Because if you haven't applied you can't appeal to the court system and say please don't foreclose on me, before I get my rental assistance. Now it is true that states like California and Illinois have extended their state eviction moratorium, so you have to find out if you live in a state where the moratorium has been extended on the state level. It was on the federal level across all states that the Supreme Court blocked on Thursday. But there are states that go no, no, no, no we're going to pass laws that protect the people, the renters in our state. And so, you also have states like Minnesota, Nevada, I think New York that have put laws into effect that will protect you from eviction while you are in the process of applying for emergency rental assistance. So, you have to do so. Now many of you may not know what's going on in your state. Are they protecting me? Are they not protecting me? So, I just want you to contact your local legal aid organization, which can tell you if anything is in place to protect you or not. Now there are landlords that are absolutely in need of their rent. And what you have to understand about rental assistance is that if you are a tenant and you get rental assistance, that rental assistance goes directly to your landlord. But landlords you have to also understand that you may need to help your tenants apply for rental assistance or you can apply directly on their behalf, on the behalf of your tenants but you have to know that both of you cannot apply. So, the landlords need to not be at odds with their tenants. You both need to understand each other situation because many of the landlords are Mom and Pops and they just need the money and I get that everybody, so work as a team here to help each other out. So, if your tenant has not applied for rental assistance, then you should absolutely help them and do it on their behalf. But if you do it on their behalf, you're going to need to get a signed consent form from them for you to be able to do so. I'm just warning all of you, the tenant and the landlord should not both apply. It's got to be one or the other. If you both apply, it is going to slow down the progress so much I can't even tell you. So, I just wanted you to know those things because that is really, really important for you to understand. Now this all eventually is going to have an effect on real estate. Now, I know I know from the very start, I was not an advocate to buy real estate. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe that a moratorium would come into effect, that protected renters against being evicted or having the homes foreclosed on if you were a landlord, and usually when that happens it drives down the price of real estate. Because all of that was postponed, we really, again, in my opinion had a lack of inventory. You also at the same time had people wanting to move from the cities to the suburbs, someplace that they could breathe, all of these things. Many of the people that worked in the city, now didn't have to go in the city, but they didn't want to live in the city anymore. So, everybody just rearranged everything the past year and a half, interest-rates were low. It just seemed like the perfect time to buy real estate because of the moratoriums. So, it did. It drove real estate prices up and up and up. But there will come a day in my opinion. And I don't know when that is. But if these foreclosures start to happen, if these evictions start to happen, if things like this start to happen, it absolutely could have an effect on real estate. I don't know when that is, but I just ask you to be careful. It just seems to me that it feels like there isn't a big rush anymore to do real estate. It's not like the head of the topics when I'm watching CNBC and everything. I'm not seeing that real estate went up this much data. So, I'm just asking you all to be careful. As I think about all of this, it can be really depressing and it can be depressing again because here we are with Delta making it so we all have to be very careful. I mean it's no secret that you know that I live on an island with KT in the Bahamas and the Bahamas was just designated as one of the most dangerous places to be for the virus. I also have a home, a little condo in Florida and Florida has more covid cases than most of the places in the United States. So, we were planning to have this great Thanksgiving again, because the family loves one another and we want everybody to be together here and it's been a tradition for years now. Everybody comes to the island, it's safe. Everything's great, and we all celebrate together and now we have to think and go, well, it looks like we're not going to be able to have Thanksgiving again. And so, it can get to you. You're afraid to go out. You're afraid to interact. Who knows? But it can have really damaging effects on you. And when you see things like Afghanistan, you see things like all the hurricanes and the damage that's going to be done today. The tornadoes, the fires in California, everything that's going on, the eviction moratorium being overturned and on and on, we can start to lose faith. We can start to lose hope. We can start doubting the United States of America. We could stop feeling the freedom that we have because it feels like we're not free to do anything and everything we want anymore. So, to that end, I just want KT to now take over and read you an email that we just got. So, this letter is from Caroline Lou and I'm calling it, learning how to dance in the rain and it goes like this: Dear Suze, this is a long email, but I promise it's a happy one. I met you a lifetime ago when I was working at a hair salon in San Francisco. It was the beginning of my career then, besides being a good saver, I was clueless about investing. Someone sold me a whole life insurance policy when I was 21. Your books put a stop to that and introduced me to a new world of personal finance. I took to them like a fish to water and haven't looked back since, I've been managing my own investment portfolios, stocks, options, real estate, now cryptos, etc. And, very successful at it for the past 30 years. I found your podcast at the beginning of this year and enjoyed listening ever since. Even after 30 years of investing, there are still things I don't know. Suze, I have a thirst for knowledge and I will never stop learning. Life was not always easy. In fact, mine, like yours, was filled with trials and tribulations. It was not a straight line, but full of zigzags. Very few people I know are fortunate enough to have a smooth uneventful life. I was born in Saigon during the Vietnam War and in 1975 lived through the total collapse of the city. In 1978, my family with just the clothes on our backs boarded a boat in the middle of the night to seek freedom from Communist Vietnam. Our boat was overloaded, the compass broke shortly after we sailed and we were hopelessly lost. We unknowingly headed towards Thailand and were chased by modern day Thai pirates. We had heard stories of how they raped women and sold them into brothels, they killed the men would dump the bodies in the ocean. Naturally, we were terrified, luckily it was dark enough. We turned off all the lights and we got away the next day. Both engines died and we drifted aimlessly. There was no land in sight. Our food and water supplies were dwindling and what seemed like a hopeless situation then, as a miracle, a huge vessel emerged on the horizon, a cargo ship on its way back to Panama. The sailors were reluctant to pick us up at first when they saw that our boat was taking on water, they immediately had a change of heart and rescued all 474 of us. We needed to get to a refugee camp in Malaysia, but the crew were on their way back to Panama. They were stuck with us at sea for nine days till another cargo ship picked us up. I recently learned that it cost about $100,000 a day to lease a freight vessel that size, rescuing us costs them almost $1 million, that was a boatload of money back in those days. And then she wrote, pun intended. Yet out of kindness they didn't abandon us, 474 lives were saved that day. We were forever grateful. After a rough year in the refugee camp, my family arrived in the us with $20 in our pocket. We lived in a mobile home park in Utah and then the Tenderloin in San Francisco. My parents, who were millionaires in Vietnam, swallowed their pride and took whatever odd jobs they could find. None of us spoke English back then, we experienced extreme hardships for the 1st 15 years. Yet my family believed in a good education, hard work and opportunities for those who seek them. inch by inch, step by step. We lifted ourselves out of poverty. I became a successful entrepreneur, my sister, a wonderful school teacher. Both my daughter and niece, are aerospace and software engineers. Not many countries in the world would have allowed us the opportunities. We did not succeed on our own, our accomplishments came from the generous guidance of others. Americans are the most generous people we know. America has its flaws, yet it's still the greatest country in the world. The liberty to express our personal viewpoints, practice religions and pursue our individual love and happiness is not to be taken for granted. We visited Japan for the very first time in 2019. Our trip was wonderful and we definitely would go back. It's a beautiful country steeped in ancient history and blossoms in modern technology. Yet underneath the serene facade is a heavy current of suppression. Being back in that part of the world after a few decades reminded me that individuality is not always encouraged. I found myself thinking in the middle of Tokyo, I was so glad to be a tourist there. When the landing gears of the plane connected with the asphalt at SFO, I breathed a sigh of relief. People say home is where the heart is, my heart is here and so is my home. I am proud to be an American and grateful to be here. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't silently thank those who had sacrificed and paved the way for all of us to enjoy our freedom and peace. Life is about making choices and sacrifices right or wrong, depends on the individuals. My parents made the sacrifice to leave everything behind in exchange for a safer life for their two girls. I made a lot of sacrifices in order to achieve my financial goal, so I can take care of them, in their golden years. In my twenties and thirties, I worked 11-hour days, now in my fifties, I work 10-hour days. Frankly, I don't regret any of it. Life is not about wishing the storm would pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain. When looking back at the last 50 or so chapters of life. I wouldn't rewrite a thing. I do it all again because it made me who I am today. I know there are a lot of people who read your books, listen to your podcast, ask 100-questions, yet never apply what they learn. For those of us who do, financial freedom is within reach.

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